Tongham is the only village between Farnham and Guildford north of the Hog's Back and near the ridge, and though there is little in it for antiquarians, the pretty little white inn and the oasthouses have often attracted painters, and the approach to the village from the south is by a road pillared and canopied with lofty elms. The churchyard holds a curious structure. A slender oak tower, recently erected as a memorial, stands apart from the church, riveted to the ground with iron struts, and contains a peal of thirteen small bells. A carillon is rung every Sunday and Wednesday; I have not heard it, but have been told that it sounds "like sheep-bells."



Not much can have been written about the older days of Tongham, but at least one delightful passage in a modern book belongs to it, and should be read under the great elms by the roadside. In Mr. George Bourne's Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, Bettesworth describes an almost incredible feat of carting timber:—

"I see a carter once," said Bettesworth, "get three big elm-trees up on to a timber-carriage, with only hisself and the hosses. He put the runnin' chains on and all hisself."

"And that takes some doing," I said.

"Yes, a man got to understand the way 'tis done ... I never had much hand in timber-cartin' myself; but this man.... 'Twas over there on the Hog's Back, not far from Tongham Station. We all went out for to see 'n do it—'cause 'twas in the dinner-time he come, and we never believed he'd do it single-handed. The farmer says to 'n, 'You'll never get they up by yourself.' 'I dessay I shall,' he says; and so he did, too. Three great elm-trees upon that one carriage.... Well, he had a four-hoss team, so that'll tell ye what 'twas. They was some hosses, too. Ordinary farm hosses wouldn't ha' done it. But he only jest had to speak, and you'd see they watchin' him.... When he went forward, after he'd got the trees up, to see what sort of a road he'd got for gettin' out, they stood there with their heads stretched out and their ears for'ard. 'Come on,' he says, and away they went, tearin' away. Left great ruts in the road where the wheels sent in—that'll show ye they got something to pull."

We got one shrub a little further, Bettesworth grunting to a heavy lift; then, in answer to a question:

"No, none o' we helped 'n. We was only gone out to see 'n do it. He never wanted no help. He didn't say much; only 'Git back,' or 'Git up,' to the hosses. When it come to gettin' the last tree up, on top o' t'other two, I never thought he could ha' done it. But he got 'n up. And he was a oldish man, too: sixty, I dessay he was. But he jest spoke to the hosses. Never used no whip 'xcept jest to guide 'em. Didn't the old farmer go on at his own men, too! 'You dam fellers, call yerselves carters,' he says; 'a man like that's worth a dozen o' you.' Well, they couldn' ha' done it. A dozen of 'em 'd ha' scrambled about, an' then not done it! Besides, their hosses wouldn't. But this feller the old farmer says to 'n, 'I never believed you'd ha' done it.' 'I thought mos likely I should,' he says. But he never had much to say."

A few hundred yards further along the Hog's Back the road drops down south-east to Seale, the first of the three ancient and interesting villages which lie under the ridge between Farnham and Guildford. Seale is a fascinating little place. It consists only of a few cottages, shy and red-roofed, deep among high hedges, bushy dells and reedy meadows, with wheatfields and barleyfields clothing the chalky slopes above. The church has been rebuilt, but has some inscriptions worth looking at. One is an epitaph on a young officer, Edward Noel Long, who was drowned at sea. According to the inscription:—

"On his way to join the British forces in Spain, he, with others of his regiment, perished in the sea near Cape St. Vincent, during the confusion of a fatal accident occasioned by the Isis man-of-war falling on board the transport on which he was embarked on the night of the 6th March, 1809."

That was just after Corunna. A carved bas-relief represents the Isis under full sail "falling on board" the transport.



Here, under the Hog's Back north and south, nearly all the cottages are old and nearly all have gardens. One perfect little building stands not far from Seale on the road to Puttenham, bowered in vines and quaintly chimneyed, with white-curtained windows opening on a low wall and stone-crop and high box borders, and, when I saw it in July, bunches of pink and white mallows glowing under an old oak door. No cottages count sunnier hours than these that stand about the long strip of green country under the chalk downs. This part of Surrey, perhaps, has changed as little as any part during the last twenty or thirty years, which have added so many miles of brick and slate to Surrey villages and towns; probably the greatest change has been in the roads. Mrs. Henry Ady, for instance, writing of the Pilgrims' Way just fifteen years ago, speaks of the road that runs through Seale, Puttenham, and Compton as being "a grassy lane, not always easy to follow, and little used in places." The road as it runs here may not take the exact line of the Pilgrims' Way, but no one could call it difficult to follow. Here and there it passes through cornfields, and it is by leaving the road to take a footpath through a cornfield that the best view is to be had of Puttenham, whose red roofs and grey church tower are set delightfully among rich elms, with a splash of ploughed chalk blazing white through the trees beyond. Puttenham has added only a few new cottages to its outskirts; under the church it is still red and mossy and lichened. The cottages are oddly built to suit the sloping ground, for the road to the church rises on a hill, and necessitates different levels for foundations and stone pathways. One of the cottages has an outside staircase to its front door, for what reason there is no guessing.

The next village under the Hog's Back on the way to Guildford is Compton, perhaps the third stage of thirsty pilgrims journeying from Whitewaysend. The main road enters Compton from the north, but the prettiest way to find the village is to drop down on it by a woodland footpath from the west. Icehouse Wood is the name of the few acres of trees through which the path runs; an old brick-lined pocket in the side of the hill suggests the name, but there are remains of another brick building higher up the slope which look nothing like an icehouse. Was the name ever Oasthouse wood, perhaps, and did they grow hops here as at Farnham? If any pilgrims left the beaten track from Puttenham which runs north of Compton they may have come to the church and the inn by this footpath. It is centuries old; it is lined, before it enters the wood, by ordered holly which may once have marked a road, and as it drops down the hill it cuts as deep into the sand as the old trackways north of Anstiebury Camp or west of Albury. Great beeches coil their roots about its edge—younger than the road if ever oasthouses stood by it.

Compton looks like a village presided over by a single mind. The cottages which add themselves to whatever is old in neighbouring buildings are designed to fit with a scheme; the cottage gardens are challenges of roses and phloxes, which shall be brightest. The black beams and jutting stories of an ancient timbered house stand above the road, an example and a guardian; the whole aspect of the village is of the quietest country. When I was walking through Compton I was told of a village festival which had been held in the spring, in which children from Bermondsey—Bermondsey once a Thames-side village itself—dressed in the old dresses and danced the old dances. They had a Queen of the May and they twined a maypole with ribands; and as I went out of Compton there were the Compton village children, six or seven of them, dancing over the dances the Bermondsey children had shown them, in the same field where the festival was held. The first of May would come round again; they would choose their own Queen and twine their own maypole.

Compton church is one of the most interesting in the country. It must be forgiven a hideous organ, whose blue and red pipes block the western arch of the nave; the sanctuary is the beauty of the church. It is the only two-storied sanctuary in England, and the origin of two-storied sanctuaries is unknown. Mr. Lewis Andre, writing in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, is inclined to think that the dedication of the upper sanctuary may have been to St. Michael; there are several altars dedicated to St. Michael in the galleries of continental churches. Another feature of the church is the wooden Norman screen which fences off the upper sanctuary; it is the oldest known in England, and dates back to 1180, according to the archaeologists. Some Jacobean screen work in the pulpit and the altar rails is an interesting contrast.

Half a mile north of Compton are a chapel and a cemetery, the joint gift of the late George Frederick Watts and Mrs. Watts; the chapel, designed by Mrs. Watts, strikes a dominant note of terracotta and red brick. There are strengths and splendours which belong to the building and its frescoes, but to me, at all events, it seems to lack the peace and mystery of quieter, duller chapels. A noble memorial of a master mind is the picture gallery in the grounds of the terracotta designing school founded by the late painter's wife. The gallery contains many of his finest pictures, and in particular the last of all which he painted—Destiny, a tremendous figure with a shadowed face; masses of filmy light are about it, and power moves in the arm that holds the book; there is a secret hidden which the grey face knows. The gallery is lighted as no London gallery is; the ceiling and walls are washed with old gold, which takes all the hardness from the spaces of sunshine playing through the roof. Mrs. Watts, I believe, added this charm to the gallery. Others besides critics owe her gratitude. Outside the gallery stand rows of pottery, the work of her pupils. Urns, vases, basins, cups, pedestals, fountains await translation to flower gardens. The birds of many Surrey lawns owe a debt to Compton for wide splash-baths of water to bathe in and drink at in the heats of summer.

Compton can be seen either from Guildford or from Godalming, and the traveller has the choice at Puttenham either of rejoining the Hog's Back immediately above the village, and so dropping down into Wanborough on the other side, or going on to Compton and perhaps climbing up again to the road on the ridge afterwards. Wanborough, a fascinating little hamlet, is worth the extra climbs up the hill. It is little more, in reality, than a manor house or farm homestead, wealthy with huddled ricks and superb barns, and a simple little church, perhaps the tiniest of all in Surrey; it measures only forty-five feet by eighteen. I found it locked, but a village child with engaging confidence told me to "look under the brick" for the key, and under a loose brick in the porch I found it. It may be lying there to-day. There is little in the church itself; but when I saw it there was a fine nest of honeybees in the roof near the bell that hangs on the wall outside. Why do bees so often swarm in churchyards? Country villagers believe that they like the sound of dinning metal; perhaps they are attracted to a church by Sunday's bell.



Wanborough sends a rough but pleasant field-road up again to the Hog's Back, which from here runs another four straight miles along the ridge to Guildford. This is certainly the noblest highway in Surrey, and, perhaps, the most characteristic of the county. You may often travel along it and yet not see the finest of the view on either side; in the summer, more frequently than not, the whole countryside north and south of the ridge is swimming in a blue haze which dims and muffles the horizon. But there is no other road on which you can walk so far and see so much broad Surrey country open out mile after mile on either side, and from which you can watch so many changes of woodland and common and cultured fields, from the green and golden hops about Farnham to the wheat and oats above Seale and Puttenham, and the long potato drills in the chalk by Wanborough. But the view is not the single beauty of the Hog's Back, though to walk high in the wind along open spaces is possible only on a few roads in the county. The Hog's Back has a treble charm belonging wholly to the roadway itself; its width, its spacious grassy rides on each side of the broad hard riband of metal that runs white and unswerving east and west, and most gracious of all, its deep and exuberant hedges. All along the road in a light wind you will get the scent of bed-straw and thyme and clover from the green border of the road, and in the short down grass find the plants that love chalk-ground, like the little blue milkwort, which spreads like a film over the higher slopes of the ridge in summer. If the roadside is scented with flowers, so are the hedges. Guelder rose and dog rose and privet blossom side by side with elder and spindle wood; above holly and hazel and buckthorn stand up gnarled and wind-driven yews, bent over the road from the south-west. To the south, it is often only through the gate-gaps in the hedge that you can see out over the flank of the hill; on the northern side the hedge is lower—low enough, indeed, to be broken in summer by tall spikes of mullein, yellow against the grey-blue air over the heaths of Pirbright and Worplesdon. The highest point of the road lies a mile beyond Wanborough on the way to Guildford; here you are over five hundred feet up, and the road drops gradually, ending with a sudden slope almost as soon as Guildford, bricky and cheap-looking from this aspect, comes into view.



CHAPTER VI

GUILDFORD

The prettiest High Street in the south of England.—Guilou, Wey, and Wye.—The Castle.—A legend of murder.—Looking at St. Christopher.—Royal hunters.—Stephen Langton.—Cloth and how to stretch it.—Aubrey scents a swindle.—King Monmouth after Sedgmoor.—A pike for a baby.—The keeper at Bramshill.—Mysterious windows.—Admirable calm.—The Queen's.—The Regent and the Apse.—St. Mary's Wall-paintings.—An ancient school.—The Angel.—Pepys at the Red Lion.—Sparagus for supper.—A Vanished Heart.—The undaunted clockmaker.

To arrive at Guildford by train is like walking into a garden over a rubbish heap. In the grace of its building, the charm of its colour, the fascination of the prospects of its hillside High Street, no town in Surrey, and perhaps only Oxford in England, is comparable with it. But between the railway station and the High Street it is desolation and blank walls. A few pretty old cottages jut out over a narrow pavement; beyond a huddled roof or two rises the tower of St. Nicholas' Church, umber and solid; nearly all else is tumbled down ugliness, broken brickwork, mud and shaggy grass. A clear space, a level green, a bed of flowers—what an introduction that might be to Guildford. But, doubtless, the rubbish heap is, or some day will be, too valuable as building land.

Beyond the turn of the road is the most delightful street in the south of England. It rises from the bridge crossing the Wey steep into blue air over the hill. Each side of it is a stairway of roofs up the slope, a medley of facades, a jumble of architecture astonishing in sheer extravagance and variety. Gabled houses, red-tiled and gay with rough-cast and fresh paint; dull, sad-faced houses with sleepy windows like half-shut eyes; square, solid Georgian houses for doctors with white chokers and snuff-boxes, and prim old ladies with mittened wrists; low, little dolls'-houses, red brick neatly pointed; tall, slim houses graceful with slender casements and light shafts of wood; casements nobly elaborate in wood-carving and heavy with leaded panes; bay windows which should belong to nurseries and high, square-latticed windows which should light a library, delicately fastened with wrought iron; painted pillars supporting window seats for cats and demure young ladies; broad-stepped entrances to hotel halls, and archways under which barrels roll to bursting cellars; Guildford High Street is a model of what the High Street of an English town should be. Has it a single dominating feature, or is its air of distinction merely compact of the grace and old-worldliness of its shops and houses? Perhaps the single extreme impression left by the High Street is its clock, swung far out over the road. Massive, black and gilt, and fastened to the face of the old Town Hall with an ingenious structure of steel stays, it has told Guildford the time for two centuries and a quarter.

Guildford High Street has its landmarks of history in its Hospital, its School, and its Town Hall, but its oldest standing record is in one of its churches. The tower of St. Mary's church, indeed, contains the most ancient piece of building in the town, perhaps in the county. Archaeologists are to be found who will argue that part of it, at least, belongs to the reign of Alfred, though there is little evidence to show that stone was used for building in Surrey before the eleventh century. Alfred, at all events, mentions Guildford in his will; he spells it "Guldeford," one of the dozen old ways of spelling a name that has always been a puzzle and a pleasure to the etymologists. What does Guildford mean? Naturally "The Ford of the Guild." The town had a guild of merchants, and there was a ford; nothing could be simpler. But the simple explanations are usually wrong; and the most convincing derivation is one which has been suggested by Mr. Ralph Nevill, who discovered a river named Guilou in Asser's Deeds of Alfred, and points to several other names along the Wey which may be traced to the same source. There is Willey House, and Willey Mill near Farnham; Wilsham Farm near Alton, and Willey Green on another branch of the river. Guildford, then, is probably the "ford of the Guilou," which in Welsh is presumably Gwili. Where, then, did the name Wey come from? It may originally have been Wye. The corruption would be easy; indeed, Cockney boating parties very likely get the right pronunciation, by accident, to-day.

Older than St. Mary's tower in associations, if not in stone-work, is Guildford Castle. The Castle stands on a mound, partly natural, perhaps, and almost certainly partly artificial. Originally, perhaps, the mound was used for an early English fortification; it was heightened by scraping up earth from a ditch at its bottom, and round it was built up a palisade of wood; possibly there was a wooden house on the top of it, and then it would have looked precisely like one of the fortified mounds in the Bayeux Tapestry. Later, it was enclosed in a shell keep; later still, a Norman square keep was built inside the shell keep; to-day, except the walls of the square keep, almost all the Castle is gone. It was never a Castle in much more than name. It has no associations of great battles; it never stood a siege; it never even held a royal prisoner. In King John's reign it was already used as a gaol, and a gaol it remained until James I, in 1612, gave it to one Francis Carter of Guildford, who used it as a private residence. Four hundred years before it had seen all its fighting. That was when the French Dauphin, invited by John's angry barons, marched against it and took it from defenders who seem to have cared little whether they kept it or not.

But the Castle still has its legend—a legend only—of cruelty and bloody massacre. In 1036, when Harold Harefoot was king, Alfred the son of Ethelred was travelling from Normandy to join his mother at Winchester. He landed in Kent, and was marching with his Normans along the Way, whether or not with the intention of eventually trying to recover his father's kingdom is uncertain; at all events, at Guildford he was seized and put to death. So much is history; legend supplies a dreadful embellishment. Early in the morning after their capture, Alfred's followers were led out into the street and condemned to death. Nine out of every ten men were butchered, until out of six hundred Normans sixty only were left alive. That was not enough to glut their captors' fury. The sixty were gone through again, and all but six were ferociously tortured to death. Alfred himself was given to Harold, who put out his eyes, loaded him with chains, and threw him into prison, where he died. Fortunately, nobody need believe the story.



An environment of meaner modern buildings has spoiled the setting in which the castle should stand. Seen from certain points, especially from below, the keep is not a very imposing structure; you cannot get far enough away from it. Far the best view is to be had from the rising ground to the south-east, where you can set the castle in outline against the sky. Then it takes on something of the romance of a Norman ruin, with its tumbling masses of ivy, its broken battlements, and the mixed greys and ochres of its masonry. The interior is uninteresting, except for the sad little carvings left by prisoners on the walls, among them a crucifix, a hermit, St. Catherine's wheel, and St. Christopher. If St. Christopher was not exactly the patron saint of prisoners, he was the kindliest saint to carve on a dungeon wall. If you looked on St. Christopher you were safe, at least for that day, from sudden death. How many thousand days of "safety" he must have brought to the Guildford prisoners!

The castle enceinte is now laid out as a pleasure ground, with all a public garden's advantages and disadvantages. Public taste demands "bedding out," even though geraniums and calceolarias fit unhappily enough with masonry fourteen feet thick and Saxon earthworks. A bowling green is in its proper place; thorns and old rose-trees have a right to grow round ruined castles; wallflowers belong to stones and mortar. But lobelias do not. Still, something even worse than bedding-out might have befallen the Castle grounds. Dr. G.C. Williamson, in his valuable little book Guildford in the Olden Time, mentions that, when the grounds were bought for the Corporation in 1886, premiums were offered to various landscape gardeners for plans showing the best means of laying out the space. One of the plans which was rejected, although attractive in other ways, "started its schedule of work with a suggestion that the ugly ruin in the centre of the grounds should be removed, and in lieu of it should be erected a light iron bandstand painted green, picked out with gold." What, one wonders, were the other attractions of the "landscape"?

Just possibly Guildford Castle was for some time a royal residence. Nearly all the old kings used to visit the country round for hunting and hawking. Henry II, soon after he came to the throne, enclosed a large tract of land north of Guildown and made it into a royal park, but whether, when he came to hunt, he stayed at the Castle itself or at the palace which was built in the park, none of the chroniclers say. The palace has long since disappeared, though it is said that the outline can be traced when the land on which it stood is under corn. The corn is supposed to turn a different colour along the lines of the foundations. In later days, the kings certainly stayed at the palace, and not at the Castle. John was at Guildford nineteen times in eleven years, and kept Christmas there in 1200 "with uncommon splendour and magnificence." Henry III had his wines stored at Guildford, probably in the caverns near the Castle, and once, with a capital eye for business, ordered that no other wines should be sold in the bailiwick of Surrey until his had found a buyer. Edward I, according to an untrustworthy story, brought Adam Gordon, a highway robber, to Guildford after he had fought and beaten him with his own royal hands, and forgiven him afterwards. The next two Edwards were often at the palace; Henry VI and Edward IV lay there; Henry VII made Sir Reginald Bray, ancestor of Surrey's historian, keeper of the Park and Manor; Henry VIII hunted in the park, and Elizabeth travelled about so frequently between the royal residences at Guildford and elsewhere that the county actually framed a remonstrance against having to pay so much for her carriages and horses. She was probably the last of the sovereigns to ride through the town from north to south, though Charles II was feasted there at the Restoration and presented with a service of plate, a proceeding which swamped the Corporation in debt.

One other distinction Guildford owes to its associations with kings. It has been selected as the scene of a remarkable novel by a remarkable writer. Martin Tupper, in his preface to Stephan Langton, takes a devoted public into his confidence as to the manner in which such a book should be, and indeed actually was, completed. He set out to write a historical novel dealing with Guildford in the days of King John, weaving into it various local legends and a love-story of an abbess and an archbishop; he "began the book on November 26, 1857, and finished it in exactly eight weeks, on January 21, 1858, reading for the work included." The list of books which he consulted in Mr. Drummond's library at Albury must be read in full for the mere physical labour of the business to be appreciated; but after such abstruse searchings, to have crammed into ninety thousand words of solid print such a concatenation of murders, arsons, slayings, swoonings, drownings and burnings must always remain a considerable achievement. The story itself is sad stuff.

Apart from palaces, Guildford's history, until comparatively recent times, has been the history of the wool trade and cloth manufacture. The beginnings of the industry go back to the settlement in the south of England, in the reign of Edward III, of Flemish weavers and dyers. Guildford naturally attracted the trade, for sheep could be successfully farmed on the downs, water-power for the fulling-mills could be had from the Wey, and the best fuller's earth in the country was to be had from Nutfield and elsewhere, only a few miles away. The fuller's teazle, and woad for dyeing, also grew, and still grow, I learn from Dr. Williamson, though I have not found either, in the neighbourhood. Before the end of the fourteenth century the cloth industry had come to the dignity of legislation. Nobody might buy cloth before it had been "fulled and fully performed in its nature"; this was to prevent dishonest people from stretching the cloth and so giving the public short measure. Later, under the Tudors, nobody might manufacture cloth except in a market-town where cloth had been manufactured for ten years past. This was no doubt for the convenience of the ulnagers, officers deputed to measure and seal all cloth brought to market. It was highly illegal to stretch cloth in any way. Thomas West, of Guildford, in 1607, was charged with having used "a certain instrument (a tenter) and other engines wherewith 100 cloths of white wool called kerseys, rough and unwrought and made for sale at Guildford, were stretched and strained in breadth and length." On another occasion five clothiers were summoned to answer a charge of having used "a certaine engine called a rope" to stretch their cloth. So important a part of Guildford's life had clothmaking become under Elizabeth that the Corporation required special acknowledgment of the fact from the innkeepers, doubtless because prosperity in the town meant full tankards emptied at the inns. Every alehouse keeper had to have a signboard hung above his door with a woolsack painted on it, under a fine of six-and-eightpence; he had to buy the sign from the hall warden at the Town Hall, and pay two shillings for it. Woolsacks were added to the borough arms. Yet the prosperity of the trade was short-lived, after all. The pride of Guildford's industry fell. Less than fifty years after the alehouse signs swung woolpacks to guide thirsty clothiers, the business came down with a run. Godalming, Farnham, and Wonersh were other flourishing centres of the trade, and in 1630 one Samuel Vassall, the merchant who took the Godalming and Wonersh cloth for shipment abroad, failed his customers. He was under arrest, and no one else could be found to take up his contracts. All the Godalming eggs were in one basket, and Guildford and Farnham suffered in sympathy. Three thousand workers were in distress; it was the beginning of the end. It could not have happened, of course, if Samuel Vassall's failure had been the only difficulty. That would have been got over somehow. But there was another agent at work. The real cause of the destruction of the Surrey cloth industry was the fact that for years the Company of Merchant Adventurers and the London Drapers' Company had been working to get the cloth trade into their own hands, and they had practically succeeded. Godalming held on for a time; but Guildford, Wonersh, and Farnham went under.

Aubrey is not content with so simple an explanation. He scents a swindler. The trade of Wonersh, he writes, "chiefly consisted in making blue cloth for the Canary Islands; the decay and indeed ruin of their trade was their avaricious method of stretching their cloth from 18 yards to 22 or 23, which being discovered abroad, they returned their commodity on their hands and it would sell at no market. The same fraudulent practice caused the decay of the Blews at Guildford." He probably muddled up musty scandals with the effect of pure business competition. He is not the last to make mistakes connected with a vanished trade. There still lingers a superstition at Guildford that Rack Close, not far from the Castle, is the place where unfortunate prisoners (perhaps the Jews whom Martin Tupper describes as suffering agonies of enforced dentistry and other tortures) were stretched upon the rack. It is, of course, the plot of ground on which were set up the wooden racks, or frames, on which the Guildford blue cloth was stretched and dried in the wind and sun.

Guildford was singularly happy in its lack of history during the Parliamentary wars. The battles over Farnham Castle we have seen. Guildford Castle was not thought worth holding. Surrey gentlemen and Surrey towns had been as backward as the rest of England in supplying Charles with his ship-money; but during the whole of the war not a shot was fired within hearing of the county capital. There was a question of safeguarding the powdermills at Chilworth, and these were secured for the Parliamentary Army. Otherwise, Guildford heard nothing more of the war than the rattle of accoutrements; there were a few levies stationed in the town, and a troop or two of horse rode through it. Perhaps Guildford's unhappiest memory of war is an echo of Sedgmoor, forty years later. The Duke of Monmouth, leaving his colliers and ploughmen to do their best against the King's cannon, had ridden off the field into Hampshire, turned his horse loose at Cranbourne Chase, and tried to hide himself in some rough ground near Ringwood. Lord Lumley and Sir William Portman were after him with the Militia; there was a reward of five thousand pounds on his head, and for a day and a night he was hunted through undergrowth and standing crops. Dogs were run through the high oats and peas, and except oats and peas he had nothing to eat. He was caught in the morning, shivering and grey-bearded, in a ditch; two days later, he was on his way from Ringwood to London, his coach guarded by strong bodies of troops, and sitting opposite him in the coach an officer whose orders were to stab him if there was an attempt at rescue. So they rode into Guildford on a Saturday afternoon, and that night the terrified prisoner lay under the roof of Abbot's Hospital. Perhaps he slept; perhaps he could only stride about the room feverishly scribbling letters of abject entreaty to the King and the great courtiers; staring wild-eyed at the early July sunlight beyond the hospital chimneys, and wondering whether he should see another Sunday dawn. It was his last; on the Wednesday morning his head was hacked from his shoulders.

Abbot's Hospital has pleasanter memories. Foremost must be the memory of its founder, Guildford's greatest citizen, the stern, kindly old Archbishop Abbot, son of a poor clothworker of the town, scholar of Balliol College, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, and predecessor to Laud in the See of Canterbury. It was a great career, and, according to an old family story, it had a curious beginning. Aubrey gives this version:—

"His mother, when she was with child of him, dreamt, that if she should eat a Jack or Pike, her son in her womb would be a great man, upon this she was indefatigable to satisfy her longing, as well as her dream: she first enquired out for the fish; but accidentally taking up some of the river water (that runs close by the house) in a pail, she took up the much desired banquet, dress'd it, and devour'd it almost all: This odd affair made no small noise in the neighbourhood, and the curiosity of it made several people of quality offer themselves to be sponsors at the baptismal fount when she was delivered; this their poverty accepted joyfully, and three were chosen, who maintained him at school, and at the university afterwards."



The great archbishop's days ended in gloom. He was shooting deer in Lord Zouch's park at Bramshill, and by an unlucky accident killed a keeper, one Peter Hawkins. Kingsley has pictured the scene:—

"I went the other day" (he writes in a letter from Eversley) "to Bramshill Park, the home of the seigneur de pays here, Sir John Cope. And there I saw the very tree where an ancestor of mine, Archbishop Abbot, in James the First's time, shot the keeper by accident! I sat under the tree, and it all seemed to me like a present reality. I could fancy the noble old man, very different then from his picture as it hangs in our dining room at Chelsea. I could fancy the deer sweeping by, and the rattle of the cross-bow, and the white splinters sparkling off the fated tree as the bolt glanced and turned—and then the death shriek, and the stagger, and the heavy fall of the sturdy forester—and the bow dropping from the old man's hands, and the blood sinking to his heart in one chilling rush, and his glorious features collapsing into that look of changeless and rigid sorrow, which haunted me in the portrait upon the wall in childhood. He never smiled again!"

In those jealous days, an archbishop was not forgiven an accident. Bishops refused to be consecrated by a prelate with blood upon his hands. A free pardon was granted him; but he never recovered his spirit, and fasted once a month on Tuesday for the rest of his life. Peter Hawkins's widow was by no means so disconsolate. The Archbishop settled an annuity of L20 upon her, and she got another husband at once.

The Archbishop's great legacy is the Hospital. Unlike Whitgift's Hospital at Croydon, it has charming surroundings; like it, it is quiet and old and solid, of good dark red brick, with mullioned windows and latticed panes, four turrets over the entrance gate, and the most graceful chimneys that ever carried up smoke from pensioners' fireplaces. There are many delightful groups of chimneys in Surrey villages and on Surrey mansions, but Guildford's chimneys are best of all.

In summer, the quadrangle is bright with geraniums, and through a passage opposite the entrance is a glimpse of a simple kitchen garden. In it, as one of the pensioners, a white-haired, blue-eyed old man, told me, vegetables are grown for the inmates of the hospital. I gathered that they were not allowed to manage the garden themselves, but that the garden produce was divided. But they cook for themselves. The pride of the hospital, however, is not the garden, but the old oak of the staircases and dining hall and board room, the settle and table, the copper caldron and the windows with their punning legend "Clamamus Abba Pater." I am not sure if my old pensioner could read it, but he pointed it out to me, and when I read it, approved. In the chapel, where there are a number of Latin verses telling the story of the painted windows, it was easier for him; he handed me a written explanation. But the explanation matters very little; the real thing is the superb colour. The story, which is of Jacob, Esau and Laban, is told on two windows, with nine lights. There are purples and greens in those windows at which you might gaze through a dozen sermons; but there is one robe of burning, translucent orange that would light a cathedral.

The history of these windows would be worth knowing. They were evidently not wholly made for the tracery, though parts of them may have been. According to one account, they were purchased by Archbishop Abbot from the Dominican Friary which used to stand at the end of Guildford North Street, and which was converted into a Manor House after the dissolution of the monasteries. But the glass belongs to more than one period, and some of it was evidently added by the Archbishop, for among the heraldic devices above the Jacob and Esau lights are the Abbot arms impaling the Canterbury arms. Also—a point which the antiquarians have no doubt noticed, but I can find no reference to it in any book—the initials S.R., which appear in the centre top opening of the north window under the date 1621, are evidently part of another inscription. On the left side of the S is part of a V or U, as if the end of a Latin word ending in "us" had had its tail chopped off. The letters must have been selected from the original inscription for some definite reason; what can it have been?

Archbishop Abbot's bones lie opposite his hospital, in the church of Holy Trinity. Of the three churches which stand on the High Street, Trinity Church is the highest up the hill, and was called the Upper Church in the days when Puritanism preferred not to mention dedications. It is, comparatively speaking, a modern building, red-brick and heavy; it was built after the old church fell down in 1740. An admirable calm must have pervaded the citizens of Guildford on that occasion. Russell, one of Guildford's historians, observes that the inhabitants, "desirous of improving" the church, had recently repaired it at a cost of L750. He then adds, reflectively, that "As the arches and pillars which supported the steeple were then taken away, it was soon after supposed to be in a very ruinous condition." On April 18, 1740, an order was given for the church to be inspected. On the 19th it was inspected, and the steeple was reported to be very unsafe. On the 20th, therefore, which was Sunday, service was performed for the last time. On the 23rd the steeple fell in and took the roof with it; the workmen had left the church a few minutes before. Even then there was at least one untroubled soul in Guildford. The verger was told that the steeple had fallen. "That cannot be," he replied, "I have the key in my pocket."

The vault in which the archbishop lies was accidentally opened in 1888, when the church was being repaired, and some brickwork fell away. Through the gap, it is said, the coffin could be seen on the floor; the form of the body was distinct, and the beard was still there. The vault was sealed again; it had been unopened for more than two hundred and fifty years. It was during these alterations that the cenotaph standing over the vault was removed further east to where it now stands. It is a typical piece of Renaissance work, florid, intricate, insistent on the ghastliness of death. The effigy of the archbishop, stern and noble, lies on its marble bed supported by stacks of gilt-clasped books; underneath, a grating reveals a medley of human bones, carved with the minutest detail. The artist evidently enjoyed the work. But it is better worth looking at, for all that, than the monument on the other side of the church, where the recumbent form of Sir Arthur Onslow is apparently giving vague directions to an imaginary audience. Wrapped in a Roman toga, he waves a sleeveless right arm; his left is propped by a set of Journals of the House of Commons. It is a relief to pass beyond such tawdry pomposities into the solemn little chapel, sacred to one of the great regiments of the Army, the Queen's, the old Second of the Line. Their badge, the Lamb and Flag, and their name they get from Katherine of Braganza, Charles the Second's queen. Later, as Kirke's Lambs, they added to a dreadful fame at Sedgmoor; but rebellion breeds brutality, and Kirke was probably no more ferocious than others who have had to deal with insurgents. Since Sedgmoor, the Queen's, or to give them their other and less distinctive name, the Royal West Surrey Regiment, have served in practically every important campaign in which the Army has been engaged. Their tattered banners, with the broken, proud inscriptions of campaigns and battles, droop above long lists of dead.

Of the two other great Guildford churches, the lower, or Church of St. Nicholas, stands at the bottom of the High Street on the far side of the Wey. Probably it is the fourth church that has stood on this site; there are at all events, records of three previous demolitions, though each demolition has left one feature standing—the Loseley Chapel, belonging to the Mores of Loseley Park. With the exception of this chapel, with its brasses and monuments, dating back to the fourteenth century memorial of Arnold Brocas of Beaurepaire (surely a name of names!), the church is chiefly interesting as being a really satisfying piece of modern architecture. It was built in 1875, and, though the interior, with its modern glass and high colouring, has none of the quiet of age, it dulls to the right tone at dusk.



The Middle Church, St. Mary's, is the most interesting of the three. The tower was built before the Conquest, possibly originally for defence: at all events, there are two windows looking north and south which are doubly splayed, after Saxon fashion, a good deal above the ground level. The rest of the church has been built at different times, beginning with the chancel, which is pure Norman, and there are actually three levels to the floor, which gives rather an odd effect. The proportions of the church have been spoiled by the cutting off of the apse of the chancel—an entirely unwarrantable piece of destruction. The history of the mutilation is characteristic of the days of the Regency. George, Prince of Wales, used to drive down to Brighton, and perhaps his coach stuck in Quarry Street, which must have been horribly narrow, between the apse of St. Mary's and the town gaol opposite. He swore as a Georgian prince should, offered the town a good round sum to have the street widened, and the Corporation, who could have sliced something off the gaol and harmed nobody, preferred to cut at the church. They never got a penny of George's money.

But the most interesting feature of St. Mary's is the group of wall-paintings in the chapel of St. John, north of the nave. These are second in importance only to the famous painting at Chaldon, and have been admirably explained by Mr. J.G. Waller, writing in the Surrey Archaeological Collections. They belong to that curious age when paintings on church walls were used as texts and preached from on Sundays, to be scratched and whitewashed out of recognition in later years by destroyers and "restorers" alike. The subjects chosen by the painter in St. Mary's Church are peculiar and strangely grouped. The centre of the group is a "Majesty," the conventional representation of the second coming of Christ. The head of the Christ has its nimbus; that He is "in his glory" you can see by the mantle of royal purple, and "the holy angels with Him" are represented by two little cramped figures, set apart to make room for other drawings. Altogether there are six medallions besides the "Majesty," and there are also designs in the spandrils above the arch, but these are separate from the subjects of the medallions. The medallions, Mr. Waller explains, represent certain scenes in the lives of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist, though only two of the stories depicted belong to the Bible. One of them, next to the "Majesty," shows the Evangelist seated in a caldron of boiling oil, in which he is being held by a hideous tormentor with a pitchfork, while a seated figure of Christ confers protection upon the Saint. In another medallion the Evangelist is seen raising to life the dead Drusiana, a lady of Ephesus who died just before the Apostle came to the city; he is also shown turning sticks and stones into gold and jewels, which he did in illustration of a sermon preached against riches. In a third medallion the Saint drinks harmlessly from a chalice of poison which has just killed two malefactors dead at his feet; and in a fourth the other John, the Baptist, is painted with a rope round his neck, dragged by an executioner before Herod. The executioner next beheads the saint, and evidently sees some terrible portent on doing so, for his hair stands on end, and his hand flies up in horror. The two other medallions are separate subjects. In one, a figure with a rope round his neck is dragged before Christ by demons; other demons, one red and one white, scream and hold out threatening claws; perhaps their question is "Art Thou come hitherto torment us before the time?" The other subject is obscure. A Jew, apparently, is being baptised; and a deed with seals is being examined by another figure, over a stream of water and blood. Mr. Waller thinks that the reference is to a legend of a Jew who desecrated an image of Christ with a spear, in imitation of the story of the crucifixion, when out of the wound there gushed a stream of blood and water. This miracle converted the Jew and his friends, who immediately made over their synagogue to the Christian Church. That would explain the sealed deed.

Other paintings in the spandrils—pictures of Soul-weighing and Punishment—belong to other theologies. St. Michael holds the balance, and a demon tries to press down one of the scales so that the soul being weighed may kick the beam. But the subject of the painting is, of course, older than St. Michael. The doctrine that souls are weighed, and that devils and angels strive for the possession of them, is one of the oldest in the history of the world's religions. It finds a place in all the creeds; it belongs to Brahminism, to Buddhism, to Mahommedanism; it is identical with the Ritual of the Dead of Egyptian mythology, in which the souls of men are weighed before Osiris, and pray for mercy as they are weighed. As at Chaldon, in another part of the painting the condemned souls are being taken away. A demon carries them off, tied up in a bundle, to the fires of hell. Doubtless the Guildford congregations, listening Sunday after Sunday to the exposition of such potent texts, came to have little taste for theology that was not served up hot and strong.

Guildford has had other teachers besides theologians. The school, a grey, venerable building, which fronts on the High Street above Trinity Church, is the oldest in the county. It was founded in 1509, by one Robert Beckingham, a rich London grocer, who owned property in Guildford. But his benefactions did not permit any great latitude in building, and it was not until Edward VI had given the school a charter and a grant, and other great Guildford men had provided funds for building and endowment, that the school, nearly at the end of the sixteenth century, found itself in full working order. Since then it has educated some famous scholars. Guildford's greatest man, George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury; his brother, Robert Abbot, Bishop of Salisbury; another brother, Sir Maurice Abbot, Lord Mayor of London; John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich; Henry Cotton, Bishop of Norwich, and his brother, William Cotton, Bishop of Exeter; Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons; Richard Valpy, author of the Greek grammar; and Sir George Grey, the Colonial statesman, Governor in 1846 of New Zealand and in 1855 of the Cape, are among its distinguished pupils. Of late years, perhaps, Charterhouse has drained away some of the supply of future Abbots and Onslows. But the school still flourishes, and the memory of its "great" headmaster, Dr. Merriman, is kept green by middle-aged Guildfordians.

Guildford's inns have been famous for centuries. Guildford is the only town in Surrey which Camden mentions in his Britannia, as having good inns; John Aubrey remarks that they are "the best perhaps in England; the Red Lion particularly can make fifty beds, the White Hart is not so big, but has more noble rooms." John Taylor, the Water Poet, in his Catalogue of Taverns in Ten Shires near London, made in 1636, goes out of his way to mention particularly that Guildford "hath very faire Innes and good entertainment at the Tavernes, the Angell, the Crowne, the White hart, and the Lyon"; and Guildford only, of all the towns he mentions, has all its inns either still standing or represented under the same names, wholly or partially rebuilt. The Angel has kept more of what is old than the others, including a panelled hall with a seventeenth century clock, and some fine timber and brickwork best seen from the inn yard. Under the Angel, too, lies one of a pair of vaulted crypts which have puzzled all the archaeologists. The two crypts lie on opposite sides of the street, and are beautiful examples of fourteenth century work in chalk; in one of them, too, there was evidently once some fresco work, but that has nearly all been rubbed away. What were the crypts for? No one knows for certain. Mr. Thackeray Turner thinks they were without doubt the undercrofts of merchants' houses; but there is better reason for supposing that they are remains of some religious foundation, perhaps of White Friars. At one time there stood in the centre of the High Street, between the two crypts, the "Fyshe Crosse," which John Russell, the Guildford historian, tells us carried on its summit a flying angel carved in stone, and was erected by the White Friars in 1345. There is no evidence to prove that this was so, though it may have been; in any case, the "Fyshe Crosse" was demolished in 1595 as being abominably in the way of the street traffic. If the White Friars ever had a convent near the cross, possibly the Angel was originally their guest-house, afterwards turned into an inn.

The Red Lion was the best inn, according to Pepys. It was at the Red Lion that he "lay in the room the King lately lay in," which would have pleased Pepys; and it was with the drawers of the inn, one Saturday night, that he and Mr. Creed made merry over the minister of the town, who had a girdle as red as his face, but preached next day a better sermon than Pepys had looked for. The inn had a garden, out of which on another occasion the gossiping little Admiralty official cut "sparagus for supper—the best that ever I ate but in the house last year." Doubtless the host of the Red Lion liked Pepys's recommendation, but Pepys and his wife must have occasionally been rather noisy guests. It was in the same inn garden that he and Mr. Creed "played the fool a great while, trying who could go best over the edge of an old fountain well; and I won a quart of sack of him." Afterwards, at supper, "my wife and I did talk high, she against and I for Mrs. Pierce (that she was a beauty) till we were both angry." Pepys's journeys to Portsmouth, where his Admiralty business took him, seem generally to have been broken at Guildford, which was the first stopping place after leaving "Fox Hall" as he calls Vauxhall. The roads must have been pretty bad, for on one occasion the coach lost its way for "three or four miles" about Cobham. However, they ended as usual at the Red Lion, and "dined together, and pretty merry" and so back to Fox Hall.

A gentler traveller through Guildford used to drive along the Hog's Back in the early morning, breakfast at the Lion or the Angel, and reach Sloane Street at half-past six or so in the evening, when she was glad to get to bed early. That was when Jane Austen was writing at Chawton. One of her letters, very typical of her in its regard for the pleasant little minutiae of a day's business, describes a drive from Chawton up to London. At Guildford she was "very lucky in my gloves—got them at the first shop I went to, though I went into it rather because it was near than because it looked like a shop, and gave only four shillings for them; after which everybody at Chawton will be hoping and predicting that they cannot be good for anything." She was then at work on Emma, whom we meet again at Leatherhead.

Guildford High Street has kept its main features for centuries. But the town has lost one of its chief buildings, which only survives in the name of Friary Street, and in one or two other names, such as Walnut Tree Close. This was the old Dominican Friary probably founded by Black Friars in the first half of the thirteenth century. Not a stone of the old Friary remains in its place, but the building saw in its time a good deal of Guildford history. Prince Henry, the eldest son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, died there of an illness which not even the skill of the friars could abate, though they tried their utmost and sent messengers riding to London for syrups and candies. The friars had a good deal to do with royalty, and had many presents from the kings. Edward I gave them oak trees for fuel and timber; Edward II gave them eight shillings; Henry IV and his family lodged with them and gave them forty shillings; Henry VII let them gather fallen wood in his park, but never gave them a penny; Henry VIII gave them many presents, of which the largest were two of five pounds, and his daughter, Princess Mary, gave them seven shillings and sixpence. But the friary fell, of course, at the Dissolution and after that, apparently, Henry used the building, which he enlarged, for his own purposes when he came to Guildford to hunt. Later, probably before the time of James I, the old friary buildings were demolished and another house built which went with the Guildford Park estate through several families. One of its owners was Daniel Colwall, a founder of the Royal Society, who conferred on its annals the dismal distinction of a suicide. He pistolled himself in an armchair, and the chair is still shown, black with blood, in the master's quarters of the Abbot's Hospital. Later still, the house was used as cavalry barracks, and three years after Waterloo, when perhaps barracks seemed less necessary than before, the buildings were pulled to pieces.

Guildford once had nine "gates"; eight have disappeared. They are marked on an old map of the borough, classically described as the "Ichnography or ground plan of Guildford." Of six "gates" or streets south of the High Street, Ratsgate, Bookersgate, Tunsgate, Saddlersgate, Bakersgate, and Shipgate, only Tunsgate remains; and on the north side Swangate, Bull's Head Gate, and Coffeehouse Gate have vanished. The charm of the chief buildings remains, but here and there modern needs have spoiled the smaller houses. In the High Street, for instance, Number 25, not much more than a hundred years ago, must have been a quite perfect little house, with its large casements and their curious iron fastenings, its noble staircase, and its delightful doorway. It was once the private residence of the Martyr family, who were hereditary town clerks of Guildford, but unfortunately it has now been turned into a shop. The proprietor very courteously allows visitors to examine the interior, but much of the fascination of the ground floor, with its panels under the windows and its delicate iron railing, has vanished altogether, and can only be recovered in imagination with the help of an old drawing. This house, by the way, a century ago contained a strange relic, strangely lost. When Peter de Rupibus, the great Bishop of Winchester, died at his castle at Farnham, his body was buried in Winchester Cathedral, but the heart was taken to Waverley Abbey. About 1730 it was accidentally dug up among the Abbey ruins, and brought to Guildford, where Mr. John Martyr kept it at Number 25, safe in its original lead case. A hundred years later the heart disappeared. No one knows how it vanished, or where it lies.

One building has altered very little. That is the old town hall, whose clock swings out over the road, and has been sketched more often, perhaps, than any clock in Surrey. The original town hall belongs to the time of Elizabeth, and was probably built into the present structure, which dates from 1683. It is in some ways the chief feature of the High Street, with its heavy balcony, supported by monstrous black oak brackets, and its cupola and bell-turret. The clock has a separate history. In the year when the town hall was built, one John Aylward, a clockmaker, came to Guildford and asked leave to set up in business. He was a "foreigner," that is, he came from another part of England, and the Gild-merchant refused permission. Undaunted, he retired and set up his shop outside the borough, made a great clock, presented it to the governing body, and so obtained the freedom of the town.



CHAPTER VII

GUILDFORD'S ENVIRONS

The prettiest town Cobbett ever saw.—Semaphores and the THING.—The Road on the Ridge.—Newlands Corner.—The Father of the Forest.—Pilgrims to St. Martha's.—A quiet churchyard.—Mr. Allnutt's poem.—St. Catherine's and the Hammer.—Worplesdon.—Sutton Place.—The Weston Rebus.—Lady Susan, the Tame Wild Sow.—The earliest mention of Cricket.

Cobbett's is the most attractive description of Guildford and its environs. "The town of Guildford," he writes in Rural Rides, "taken with its environs I, who have seen so many, many towns, think the prettiest, and, taken all together, the most agreeable and most happy-looking that I ever saw in my life. Here are hill and dale in endless variety. Here are the chalk and the sand, vieing with each other in making beautiful scenes. Here is a navigable river and fine meadows. Here are woods and downs. Here is something of everything but fat marshes and their skeleton-making agues. The vale all the way down to Chilworth from Reigate is very delightful." He has as many praises for the neighbourhood on the other side. "Everybody that has been from Godalming to Guildford knows that there is hardly another such a pretty four miles in all England. The road is good; the soil is good; the houses are neat; the people are neat; the hills, the woods, the meadows, all are beautiful. Nothing wild or bold, to be sure, but exceedingly pretty; and it is almost impossible to ride along these four miles without feelings of pleasure, though you have rain for your companion, as it happened to be with me." Would the scenery have pleased Cobbett better if it had been "wild or bold"? Probably not, since he calls Hindhead "the most villainously ugly spot on God's Earth." Cobbett liked smiling pastures and well grown crops. His prettiness is good timber and clean farming.

In Cobbett's time, there were no suburbs to Guildford; to-day the suburbs grow. Pewley Hill, south-east of the town, which old pictures of Guildford show you bare downland, is hardly so much spotted as hidden by undistinguished villas and dreary brick. Perhaps it would please Cobbett as well as it pleased him ninety years ago. Pewley Hill in his day stood naked to the wind, except for the semaphore and its buildings, and Cobbett deeply hated the semaphore. To us, who have the telephone and telegram, there seems nothing hateful in it (unless we hate the telephone), but to Cobbett the line of semaphore towers between London and Portsmouth stood for all that was dreadful in war, debt, jobbery and alarums. He could see nothing attractive in the cleverness and despatch of a system which enabled news to be sent from London to Portsmouth in a few seconds. (It took three-quarters of a minute to signal the hour of one o'clock from Greenwich to Portsmouth and back again to Greenwich). All he saw was bloody war and money wrongly spent. Thus, of one of the line:—

"This building is, it seems, called a Semaphore, or Semiphare, or something of that sort. What this word may have been hatched out of I cannot say; but it means a job, I am sure. To call it an alarm-post would not have been so convenient; for, people not endued with Scotch intellect, might have wondered why the d—— we should have to pay for alarm-posts and might have thought that with all our 'glorious victories' we had 'brought our hogs to a fine market' if our dread of the enemy were such as to induce us to have alarm-posts all over the country!" The semaphore north of the road from Guildford to Farnham urges him to even higher flights:—

"What can this be for? Why are these expensive things put up all over the country? Respecting the movements of whom is wanted this alarm system? Will no member ask this in Parliament? Not one! not a man: and yet it is a thing to ask about. Ah! it is in vain, THING, that you thus are making your preparations; in vain that you are setting your trammels! The DEBT, the blessed debt, that best ally of the people, will break them all; will snap them, as the hornet does the cobweb; and even these very 'Semaphores' contribute towards the force of that ever blessed debt."

Semaphore House still stands upon Pewley Hill, a modern villa; opposite it, which would infuriate the old reformer if he could see it, War Office Ground, marked off with barbed wire and minatory notice-boards. A hundred years hence, perhaps the fort on Pewley Hill will be exhibited as one of the curiosities of nineteenth-century Guildford.

Pewley Hill is dull enough in itself to-day, when the down grass has gone and the bricks are multiplying, but it leads to some of the wildest and oldest and sweetest of all scenes in the county. You must go over Pewley Hill to come to the downs, and the downs between Guildford and Netley, by Newlands Corner, above Albury and Chilworth, are for me, at all events, the loveliest spot in Surrey. There are other heights in Surrey with wider views of scenery; there is Hindhead with its almost complete circle of horizon, from Nettlebed by Henley to the Devil's Dyke above Brighton; there is the road above Reigate, which looks out over a thousand roofs and miles of well farmed fields; and there is Leith Hill, the highest of all hills in south eastern England. But the stretch of downland running from Guildford to Newlands Corner has a charm that belongs to none of these. It is not merely the peace and sunshine of the broad path along the ridge, with its downland flowers and Chalk Hill Blue butterflies; not only the width and extent of the view over the Weald, though it is of all views in Surrey one of the loveliest—unlike the flatter panoramas of Leith Hill and Reigate in that it is a view not only of fields and meadows, but of tree-clad hills, shouldering into fainter greens and greys away to Hampshire and Sussex. The enchantment is something else; the closeness of touch with so much that is dim and old; the nearness of so much that cannot be reached in changing towns, on modern roads. For this is unchanged, untouched, unsoiled, part of the great Way that brought the merchants of Cornwall riding to the Roman port of Rutupiae in the Isle of Thanet with tin mined in the Cassiterides. The valley below may have changed from forest to meadow and plough, but the green road along the ridge remains what it was before ever it felt a Roman wheel. No fresher air nor clearer sunlight lies on any Surrey downs than on those broad aisles of shaven turf, lichened whitethorns and wind-bent yews.

Newlands Corner has seen more than one battle. Mr. St. Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator, and one of the earliest founders of rifle clubs in the country, has his home on the downs close by, and Newlands Corner, the centre of the rifle clubs of Surrey, has been the scene of assaults and the counter-attacks made by Volunteer cyclists against defending bands of riflemen. The riflemen have held their own under the severest fire; Ministers and distinguished soldiers have watched them.

On the downs by Newlands Corner, near the great trackway of the trading Britons, stand some of the finest yews in England. To one of a group of trees, a monarch whose descendants count their centuries in a ring about him, belongs a noble poem. Mr. William Watson, under the shade of its branches, wrote The Father of the Forest. These are the opening lines:—

Old emperor Yew, fantastic sire, Girt with thy guard of dotard kings,— What ages hast thou seen retire Into the dusk of alien things? What mighty news hath stormed thy shade, Of armies perished, realms unmade?

Already wast thou great and wise, And solemn with exceeding eld, On that proud morn when England's rays, Wet with tempestuous joy, beheld Round her rough coasts the thundering main Strewn with the ruined dream of Spain.

Hardly thou count'st them long ago, The warring faiths, the wavering land, The sanguine sky's delirious glow, And Cranmer's scorched, uplifted hand. Wailed not the woods their task of shame, Doomed to provide the insensate flame?

Mourned not the rumouring winds, when she, The sweet queen of a tragic hour, Crowned with her snow-white memory The crimson legend of the Tower? Or when a thousand witcheries lay Felled with one stroke, at Fotheringay?

Ah, thou hast heard the iron tread And clang of many an armoured age, And well recall'st the famous dead, Captains or counsellors brave or sage, Kings that on kings their myriads hurled, Ladies whose smile embroiled the world.

The pilgrims' road, as I have tried to show elsewhere, separates from the Way again at Guildford. The old British track probably kept to the northern ridge; the pilgrims who visited Guildford may have left by the same road, but they turned away across the valley to the little chapel of St. Martha, which stands on a hill two miles south-east of the town. The pilgrim's track to the chapel, vanished in parts, becomes plain enough when it crosses the road which now runs from Guildford to Chilworth west of the chapel by perhaps half a mile. Here it is a wide smooth path of the finest down grass, cropped close by rabbits, with which all this breezy hill must be alive by night. Nearly at the top the path breaks into sand, which must have tested the less elastic of the travellers to the shrine pretty severely, but the sand breaks again into an open plateau of as fine grass as the path below. On this plateau stands the little church, alone in the sun and wind.



Sixty years ago St. Martha's was a ruin; as unhappy a little building as St. Catherine's on the hill beyond the Wey. It was restored in 1848, and has taken out of the past a quiet and serenity that set it in the old years, in tranquil sunshine, in the peace of English Sundays. All the winds blow about it; it is alone in its acre of smooth down grass; within its churchyard wall are the graves of country labourers and their children, lowly mounds hardly seen, without the memory of a name, at one with the purpose of the earth they dug and sowed. Pine trees stand round the open space of the hill; bluebells in May spread a film under them; beyond the grasses, heather and ling die from August purples to the bronze of autumn. The Surrey hills are to the south and west; farthest on the horizon is the faint blue of the Sussex downs.

There are early Norman walls and arches in the restored chapel. St. Martha's may be one of the three churches which Domesday assigns to the manor of Bramley, belonging to Bishop Odo of Bayeux. A less trustworthy tradition is that Stephen Langton is buried there; the lids of the old stone coffins found in the chapel when it was restored probably account for that legend. Martin Tupper accepted the legend as history.

St. Martha's chapel has inspired more than one poet, Tupper among them, but none have written with more charm on the lonely little building than Mr. Sidney Allnutt, in a poem which was published in the Spectator last year. Here are six stanzas out of many:—

A little chapel grey with years, And bleached with sun and rain, One solid four-square tower it rears Above strong walls which still oppose Firm front to elemental foes That rage at them in vain.

Far southward from St. Martha's Hill, And to the east and west, The downs heave up green shoulders, till The distance with its magic blue Envelops every other hue, And crest is lost in crest.

Safe sheltered by the encircling downs The chequered valleys show Their tapestry of greens and browns, Made rich by fields of golden grain, And threaded by a silver vein Where Wey's clear waters flow.

A churchyard bare of shrub or tree, All open to the sky, To every wind of heaven free, Lies round the chapel, carpeted With soft, sweet turf where happy dead In dreamless slumber lie.

For, far removed from camp or mart, Beneath the sacred sod Of that blest hill they sleep apart: Forgotten by the world below, After life's spendthrift toil they know The rest that comes from God.

And, oh, it must be good to sleep Within that churchyard bare, While turn by turn the seasons keep A bedside watch, and God may see Safe in St. Martha's nursery His children pillowed there.

If I had to choose a month and an hour to visit St. Martha's, it would be an evening late in April with the trees in the valley at their freshest and the song of blackbirds about the hill. Others, perhaps, would choose an August day, with the wind scented and the hill purpled with heather; perhaps, too, in August the rabbit-cropped turf is smoothest and greenest. Others may find the chief beauty of the hill in the bronze and yellow of the changing leaves of October; there are no hills where the beech glows with a deeper fire than over Albury and the Tillingbourne. Others even might ask for the vague, wet airs of midwinter, with the shouldering hilltops east and south and west faint and mysterious in the clinging mist, and never a house-roof to be seen. That is an effect of strange loneliness; but the abiding charm of St. Martha's is the peace of clear air, in the enchantment of low spring sunlight on the down turf and the quiet walls.

Once I saw a remarkable sight by St. Martha's. Incongruously enough, the wooded hillsides below the chapel are preserved as game-coverts; indeed, pheasants are shot quite close to the churchyard. There are rides cut through the wood in which broods of young pheasants are fed by their fostermothers' coops; and looking down one of these rides on a day early in August, I watched for some time a curious collection of birds feeding together in front of the coops. There were the young pheasants, of course, there was quite a crowd of small birds, finches chiefly, but a few thrushes and hedge-sparrows; there were seven or eight turtle-doves, five jays, and, queerest of all companions for doves and pheasants, a carrion crow. I thought at first he must be a rook, but there was no doubt about it. I looked up as I walked away, and over me sailed five herring gulls, high and slow.



St. Catherine's chapel, on the other side of Guildford, has not the same lonely charm as St. Martha's. It has never, like St. Martha's, been restored, and the hill on which it stands is sacred to nobody. Children climb about its walls and windows; cockneys scratch their names, and picnic parties bestrew the grass with paper. Yet St. Catherine's, in the days before pilgrimages ceased and shrines were left to moulder, perhaps heard as many Aves as her sister chapel on the hill beyond the Way. A country legend is common to both chapels. St. Catherine and St. Martha, in the wonderful days of the giants, were sisters who built chapels on neighbouring hills. They had but one hammer between them, and they hurled it high over the valley one to another, St. Martha catching it from St. Catherine, driving in a nail and hurling it back again.

North of Guildford to the west is Worplesdon Common, a stretch of heathery, rushy ground over which have gone many marches and manoeuvres, and north of the common is the home of Mr. Frederick Selous, the African traveller and naturalist. Mr. Selous throws his collection of trophies open to the public for a small sum, and his garden is known to the readers of the Field as the home of rare and shy birds. The owner has described, with callous disregard of the feelings of less fortunate ornithologists, the nesting operations among his bird boxes of half a dozen nuthatches.

To the north-east, a mile from the main road from Guildford to Ripley, is Sutton Place, perhaps the finest piece of domestic architecture in the south of England. Mr. Frederic Harrison has described it at length in his Annals of an Old Manor House. It was built by Sir Richard Weston about 1525. The architect is unknown, but the house is peculiarly interesting, partly because it is the best example of the use of terra cotta in the moulding combined with brickwork, and partly because it is one of the earliest houses in England built as a country home rather than a castle. Sir Richard Weston, the founder, was one of the ablest servants and greatest friends of Henry VIII, the more astonishing a friendship in that it was never broken. Henry VIII sent his friend's son to the scaffold, accused as a lover of Anne Boleyn; he went to the block protesting his innocence, and there was nothing to prove him guilty; his last words were a defence of the queen. His son, a baby when his boyish father was executed, married the daughter of Sir Thomas Arundell. Sir Thomas had suffered for treason, so that husband and wife were the children of parents who had been sent to the block. They entertained Elizabeth at Sutton; she would have a child's memory of the founder of the house, and doubtless praised the rebus in the terra cotta moulding, the "R.W.," the grapes and the tun.

Later representatives of the Westons at Sutton were the Salvin family, and it was one of these Salvins, I imagine, to whom Frank Buckland refers in his edition of White's Selborne. Captain Salvin lived at Whitmoor House, near Guildford, and was the happy owner of a tame wild sow. Lady Susan was her name, and this is how her master describes her:—

"My sow originally came from Syria, and was given to me by H.H. the Maharajah Duleep Singh. She is a remarkably fine healthy animal, and her instinct and affection can only be equalled by the dog. She follows me almost daily in my walks like a dog, to the great astonishment of strangers. Of course I only take her out before the crops are up, and too low to injure, during the spring and summer months. I always have her belled, to hear when she is in the wood, etc.; and the bell, which is a good sheep's bell, is fastened round her neck with a strap and a buckle.

"Her leaping powers are extraordinary, either over water or timber; indeed, only a few weeks since she cleared some palings (between which she had been purposely placed to secure her for a time) three feet ten inches in height. Knowing my pig's excellent temper, even when she has young pigs, and when domestic sows are always most savage, I was once guilty of a practical joke. I got a blacksmith who was quite ignorant of even the existence of my pig, to 'come and ring a pig.' The stye being under a building, he had to enter it at a low door, which was some distance from the sow's yard, where she was feeding. He entered, shutting the door to keep the pig in, and thinking his subject was an ordinary one and that assistants were following him to hold the cord, etc. He had not been gone a minute, before I heard the greatest 'rum-ti-tum' at the door, and cries of 'For goodness' sake, sir, let me out! let me out! I never saw such a beast in all my life!' and out came the poor blacksmith pale with fright, but all the consolation he got was a jolly good laugh at his own expense."

All English cricket owes a debt to Guildford. It is in the annals of Guildford that there occurs the first known mention of the game of "crickett." In 1598 there was a dispute over the rights of a plot of land near the north town ditch, and "John Derrick, gent., one of the Queen's Majestie's coroners of the county of Surrey, aged fifty-nine" was called to give evidence. He stated that he had known the land for fifty years and more, and that when he was a boy at the Free School at Guildford he and his fellows "did runne and plaie there at crickett and other plaies." The evidence is interesting, because he is not asked for an explanation. Everybody at that date evidently knew at once what cricket meant. Besides being a cricket ground, the land was used for baiting bears.



CHAPTER VIII

SHALFORD AND WONERSH

Shalford and its Stocks.—The Common.—Vanity Fair.—The Court of Dusty-Feet.—Unstead in floodwater.—Dog Smith.—Bramley Mill.—Wonersh, Ignorsh, Ognersh.—A village well cared for.—A Grisly Barometer.—Tangley Manor.

Eight highroads converge on Guildford, and these are fed, of course, by many minor roads. Besides the roads, five lines of railways run into and leave the town, so that it is eminently possible, from Guildford, to do either of two things, to take a walk in a ring and return to the town by another road, or, what is perhaps a little more luxurious, but enables you to cover more country, you can walk in almost any direction, and at the end of the day take a train back to the town. The highroad runs north to Woking and Horsell; north-east the Ripley road goes by Cobham to Kingston and London; eastwards, under Merrow Downs, you can walk by Clandon and the Horsleys to Leatherhead; a smaller road travels south-west by St. Martha's Chapel to Chilworth; almost due south a road runs through Shalford to Wonersh, or breaks off at Shalford to go east to Dorking; another southern road is to Godalming; the great west road passes over the Hog's Back to Farnham, and north-west lie Worplesdon and Bisley. And the railways can be joined north, east, south, and west.

Godalming, four miles away, is a centre in itself, and has its own chapter. But Guildford is the best centre from which to see some of Godalming's neighbours. A good ring is by Shalford through Bramley and Wonersh, returning by Chilworth under St. Martha's. Shalford lies a mile to the south, and with its old mill, its inn, its white and green cottages, and its stocks, is a charming survival perilously near the Guildford builder. The stocks stand by the churchyard gates, side by side with a curious little shrubbery. Shrubberies are rare ornaments of a village, but this sets a pretty foreground to the low line of whitened cottages behind it.



Shalford Common is wide and breezy; geese cackle over its grass, and you may see more than one cricket match being played on holiday afternoons. Once, in 1877, eleven Mitchells played eleven Heaths on the common; the Heaths were all of the same family, but the Mitchells, though related, were not. But the greatest tradition of Shalford Common is its connection with a Bedfordshire man, John Bunyan. Bunyan is said to have lived in two houses in Surrey, a cottage on Quarry Hill in Guildford, and at Horn Hatch, now pulled down, on Shalford Common. Probably the tradition would not have grown up without good ground; there is one possible reason, at all events, for connecting Bunyan with this part of Surrey. The idea of Pilgrim's Progress is said to have been suggested to him by the very Pilgrims' Way, and Vanity Fair to be the fair held on the meadow between Shalford and Guildford below St. Catherine's Chapel. The Rector of Shalford had the privilege of holding a fair from the days of King John, and undoubtedly Shalford Fair was one of the largest held on the Way; indeed, it was so popular that the Guildford clergy disputed the Rector's right to exact fees from the Winchester merchants attending it. They wanted the money in Guildford. But the Chief Justice of the King's Bench gave his judgment in the Shalford Rector's favour, and at the height of the fair's prosperity it actually covered a hundred and forty acres of ground. If tradition is right, then, it was in the fields by Shalford Church that Bunyan pictured Christian and Faithful seized and brought before the Court of the fair, and poor Faithful sentenced by Lord Hategood "to be led from the place where he was to the place from whence he came, and there to be put to the most cruel death that could be invented." No doubt Bunyan's description of the trial of the two pilgrims at the fair is an exact picture of the methods of the Court of Pie-powder, or Pied-puldreaux, the tribunal which could be summoned at a moment's notice among the merchants of the fair. The Court of Dusty-Feet certainly worked with alarming despatch.

If Bunyan really drew his Pilgrim's Progress from his memories of the pilgrims and their fairs on the Way, he may have had other scenes in his mind which suggested other names. The Delectable Mountains may have been the blue line of the Sussex Downs, or the hills by Black Down and Hindhead. The Slough of Despond may have been the marshy pools of Shalford Common, or the ponds under the hill by Chilworth; and Doubting Castle, spelt Dowding Castle, is actually a name to be found on the Surrey map, south of Epsom Downs on Banstead Heath. But whether Bunyan ever saw it there is another matter.

From Shalford Common the road runs almost straight to Bramley. But it is worth while to leave the main road as it crosses the single railway line from Shalford to Bramley and Cranleigh, and to turn to the right down the little road that leads to Unstead Farm, a delightful brick and timber building, with exceptionally graceful chimney-stacks and latticed casements, behind which, in summer, there should surely be the largest bowls of roses. I saw the old house last in a frosty December sunset, surrounded by floodwater, with farm horses splashing up the road, and plovers crying round the edges of the stream. It looked desolate enough; but three hundred years ago it was a fine house, at one time the property of the Austens of Shalford, and later passing into the hands of the trustees of Henry Smith, the "Dog Smith" who gave so much to Surrey charities, and about whom Aubrey heard a quaint legend. "He had the nickname of Dog-Smyth, because he kept no house, but dined at friends' houses, and then desired a bit for his dog, which was to refect himself." Was he merely a crochety old gentleman who always went about with his dog, or did he keep the dog's dinner for himself? Another story about him was that once, when he was a poor boy, he was whipped through one of the Surrey parishes—accounts differ as to whether it was Chilworth, Tatsfield, or Wanborough—and that he struck that particular parish out of his will, but left large sums to all the others. He certainly left a large fortune to Surrey parishes, and no bequests have found their way to Chilworth, Tatsfield, or Wanborough, but that is the only foundation for the old story.

A mile south-west of Unstead Farm lies Bramley, which has grown up round the station of the single railway line running to Guildford. The restored church holds some good glass, but the prettiest thing in Bramley is an old mill which, with its medlar tree overhanging the water, its ducks and pigeons, its octagonal brick dovecot and lichened roofs, and its sweet-water grape vine clambering on the old walls, has a rich grace of colour and age setting it, in modern Bramley, a thing apart.

Bramley is almost joined by Wonersh to the east: Wonersh with its quaint other names, Wogheners, which was perhaps the original form, Wonish, Ignorsh, and Ognersh. Wonersh was once a very important village. It was one of the centres of the wool trade in the county, and of Wonersh, as of Guildford, Aubrey has the same sad story to tell of cheating clothiers. But, as we have seen, the real cause of the decay of the Surrey wool industry was something quite different. Perhaps one of Wonersh's rival clothiers started the story of the stretched cloth; perhaps it was never a libel.

One of the features of the village is an enormous wall, built by one of the Lords Grantley who had Wonersh Park, and put up the wall, apparently, to prevent neighbours and passers-by from gazing with too great enthusiasm at his lordship's grass and trees. It was a brother of the third Lord Grantley, George Norton, Recorder of Guildford, who married the famous Mrs. Norton, one of the three beautiful granddaughters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Besides Lord Grantley's wall, the village holds some charming old cottages, several of them carefully restored, and two or three square-set, solid eighteenth-century houses. There is also a slender brick chimney of elaborate design of which Wonersh residents are justly proud. The village, indeed, conveys the impression of being affectionately cared for, which is not always the case with villages which belong so much to builders long dead; but nothing, perhaps, is a better example of the care with which the past is preserved than the church, which is a perfect piece of restoration and scholarly rebuilding combined. It is the work of a Surrey architect, Sir Charles Nicholson, a neighbour at Chilworth, who carried out his difficult task in 1901, and has since written an interesting little pamphlet on the church's history. Two or three peculiarities distinguish the interior. One is a crypt, paved with fourteenth-century encaustic tiles, which Aubrey describes as "a vault strongly barricaded with iron." Another is a magnificent Flemish chandelier, not a common adornment of a chancel. A third is a high tomb of Sussex marble, which bears no inscription. But the person buried in it must have been of considerable distinction, for the cassia in which the remains Were embalmed still sweats from the marble in wet weather—a grisly barometer. Possibly within may rest the remains of one of the Westons or Carylls, both of which were great families of the neighbourhood. It was John Caryll, buried in this church, on whom was written an epitaph quoted by Aubrey, but not now to be found. The eight lines of rhyme ended with what was perhaps thought appropriately cheerful resignation:—

"And now, which long before he did desire, Caryll sings Carrolls in the Heavenly Choire."

North of Wonersh rises Chinthurst Hill, a knoll conspicuous for miles round, especially in winter, when the bleached grass of its wind-swept, pine-crowned cap gleams strangely white in the sun. North of Chinthurst Hill, again, on the far side of the open stretch of Shalford Common, stands one of the most perfect timbered houses—perhaps it is the most perfect—in the county. This is the famous Tangley Manor, which according to the legend was one of King John's hunting boxes, and is now as delightfully picturesque a country house as is to be seen in the south of England. Like other old mansions in the county, Crowhurst Place, for instance, the building of it belongs to two periods. It is a house, or rather a hall, within a house. The hall is the older part. It was a feature of English country life previous to the sixteenth century that the labourers and dependants of the great country estates ate, and in the earliest days even slept, in the hall of the mansion. When that system of common hall life ended, it nearly always happened that the great hall was cut in two, by a floor and bedrooms built in the upper part. This is what has happened at Tangley and at Crowhurst Place, and in each case the remains of the hall can be traced in the superb oak tie-beams which cross the bedrooms from side to side of the house. The hall is cased by a more modern building, a rich timber framework with the date 1582 carved sprawling on the wood. The garden has every charm that can belong to lichened brick walls, loop-holed and many-gated, and through the garden round the house runs a moat, in which trout swim, or once swam. John Evelyn of Wotton knew the Tangley manor moat and garden; possibly some of the daffodils which brighten the grass in April are descendants of bulbs he planted. On a pane of glass in one of the bedrooms he has scratched his name and the date "John Euelyn, 1641."